Vinyl Maelstrom

Why does "4 time" dominate modern western music?

• Ian Forth

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Turn on commercial radio and what time signature are you 95% likely to hear in the  first song? 4 beats to the bar, that's what. Is that just the natural pace of music or is something else going on?

In fact, if you went to a dance in the nineteenth century, it would most likely be in 3 time, or a waltz. Travel to, say, Burundi, Bulgaria, Bengaluru or Bursa and outside of commercial radio, local time is quite different - 11/8, to take one example.

So how did 4 time come to dominate? Was it the classical composers? Radio managers? The Romans? Join me, Ian Forth for a discussion of how we ended up with the ubiquity of 4 beats to the bar.

Be expertly briefed each week on a wide variety of intriguing musical topics.

Why do 4 beats to the bar dominate western music?

Introduction

"A lot of people don’t know this, but time signatures are actually fractional representations of how much music a piece is. For example, anything in 3/4 is 75% music. Same for 6/8. 9/8 is really special, 113% music. 4/4 is the standard, 100% music. Follow for more music theory."

Not my words, but those of a young woman called Jess Is Anti-Soup on Twitter.

But just to zero in on Jess’s last words there. 4/4 is the standard, 100% music. There is often truth in humour, as we know. 4 beats to the bar has become the standard pop time signature. Why is this?

It’s time for the medium-sized dive.


Medium-Sized Dive

What exactly is a time signature? Most of you will roughly know the answer to that question, but let me just briefly spell it out, as I understand it.

Back in prehistoric times there were, of course, no means of writing music down. Then there was but as far as we can tell no one really had a go of organising music so that you could read the time of it until just a few hundred years ago when a system evolved called mensuration - or measurement, as we would refer to it nowadays. Mensuration arranged music on the page for musicians to read in the form of time signatures.

A time signature is a set of two numbers, one on top of the other. The two numbers in a time signature tell you how many of one kind of note there are in each measure in the song. For example, 4 over 4 means that there are four beats in each measure and the quarter note gets one beat.

Seven Nation Army by The White Stripes or Heart of Glass by Blondie are in 4/4 time. It happens to be quite danceable typically as well, hence the phrase “4 to the floor”.

The other principal time signature which you sometimes still hear in pop songs is 3 beats to the bar – what is sometimes known as a waltz. A song like Perfect by Ed Sheeran is in waltz time. Each measure or bar has 3 beats to it. Very occasionally you do hear other more unusual time signatures. Pink Floyd’s Money, for example is mostly in 7 / 8 time. The Mission Impossible Theme is in 5/4 time, as is Dave Brubeck’s “Take 5”.

Now everything I’ve just said applies to western popular music. If you go to eastern Europe, to Asia and to Africa, you’ll hear, outside of the commercial radio stations, a plethora of other time signatures in traditional music. So why did the west end up with 4 or sometimes 3 beats to the bar? Let’s have an entirely reasonable discussion.


Discussion

The 4 Limb Theory

The first thing to say is that no-one seems 100% sure why music in the west is predominantly 4 beats to the bar. However, we do have some plausible theories. Discussion on the topic devolves into certain grooves of speculation.

The first is around the fact that we have two arms and two legs.

Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to drum. Some people take to it quite naturally, some people struggle. I fall into the latter category. However I am able, for a while to maintain a basic rock beat and that typically goes hi-hat – snare – hi-hat – bass. Then you start again.

That quite honestly is the limit of my abilities, to keep that basic beat going.

One thing to notice about it is that it uses four limbs, two legs and two arms. 99% of people on the planet have two legs and two arms, so there does seem to be a correlation of both what is possible and what is natural about a rhythm that encompasses 4 beats to the bar.

Another way of explaining the origin of 4/4 and connecting it to the body might be that it has its origins in marching. When I was young we would wake up early on the morning of the carnival and bag a good spot on Coat of Arms Bridge Road to watch the marching bands and floats go past. (You have to bear in mind this was in the days before the internet.) Thinking of those marching bands, it’s not hard to understand why they marched in the rhythm of 4 beats to the bar as they had to both walk and play their instrument at the same time. And these aren’t necessarily professional musicians but schoolboys and other amateurs.

There are other western things which gravitate to 4s. Houses still have four walls. The compass is north, south, east and west. Books are square, screens are square, windows, board games, biscuits, cushions, cardboard boxes, tiles, CDs, coasters and mats, cupboards, windows, dice, stamps, toast, sugar cubes, Rubik cubes. All square. Modern cities are arranged on a grid system and people don’t get lost so easily.

Some people sometimes argue that 4 beats to a bar is instinctive. I’m not so sure that’s true, otherwise there wouldn’t be so many other rhythms outside of western culture. But it does seem to be true that westerners think most frequently in fours.


Cognitive limits to numbers

We talked just now about the amount of information it’s possible to carry around in your head. Humans do have limits when it comes to numbers. I can hold in my head all the members of a 24-person World Cup squad, just about – but even then I’m breaking it down into defenders, midfielders and attackers. But if I try to remember all 520 songs by The Fall, say, how would I do that? Breaking it down by album, but there are 31 albums. Break that down by decade. If I try to remember all the counties in the UK or states in the US, you have to compertmentalise via the alphabet or some other mnemonic. There’s a reason there are 4 members of Seinfeld and 4 Sex in the City members. The friends in Friends subdivide into 3 and 3.

There's a limit to the number of discrete pieces of information we can keep in our working memory at any one time. So how do non-western musicians manage complex and more lengthy time signatures? It seems what Bulgarians or Indians, say, do is to conceive the more complex time signatures in terms of groups of simpler ones, like thinking of 11/8 as 3+3+3+2. Four is a big enough number to be subdivided interestingly, but not so big as to be overwhelming.


Musical Notation and the Chicken and the Egg

This will get a little technical.

When time signatures developed in the 17th century out of the earlier system of "mensuration signs" there were a highly limited number of possibilities. In fact, a time signature would be unlikely not to follow one of the four possible divisions of twos and threes. 4/4 and 2/4 come from dividing in two and two, 3/4 from three and two, 6/8 from two and three, and 9/8 from three and three.

One could ask, of course, why we have two and three as the basic units in mensuration. There doesn’t seem to be a definitive answer for that, although one theory I have read and rather like is that the Romans divided time into 12s – from which we get our 24-hour days. From there it was a short leap to divide time signatures into 2s 3s and 4s. This seems at least plausible.

Now it might be that music just followed the notational system available. It's something of a chicken-and-egg problem, and it's hard to be entirely sure, since we don't know what rhythms were in use in actual practice before people started inventing systems to theorize and notate them. But once those systems came into existence, the notation certainly served as a constraint on what music would be written down.

I’m reminded of theories on language. There isn’t time and indeed it’s outside our remit, but linguists like Saussure debate whether language shapes our thinking as well as thinking shaping our language. Because something has a label, are we more inclined to believe in its existence? If there’s no word for, say, honour or shame in the language are you less likely to think in those terms, ultimately affecting your behaviour. If there’s no word for blue in the language, as there wasn’t for ancient Greeks, perhaps you don’t see the sky as blue.

In other words, because the notation or language of music favoured parcels of 2s, 3s and 4s, that was the way music started to be written. It’s a version of “what gets measured, gets done”. Perhaps after a while the other time signatures that may well have existed in ancient and mediaeval times gradually got forgotten about – although they remain just as strong outside the Western canon.


4/4 time versus 3/4 time

We can see then how divisions around 2s, 3s, 4s, even 9s and all the way up to 12 became the norm. We can see how 3s and 4s became the dominant vogue because they were easier to deal with numerically. But it’s an interesting question as to why 4 beats to the bar has edged out 3 beats to the bar in terms of modern popular music.

We talked about football earlier and it’s notable that when international teams get together they have to quickly agree on a formation the majority are most comfortable with from their clubs. Coincidentally that’s often 4-4-2 or 4-3-3. So what’s tended to happen as time goes on is that the ubiquity of 4 beats to a bar has become like a football formation everyone knows and is familiar with. Maybe a bit like everyone agreeing to speak English when they get together for an international conference when they used to agree on speaking in French. In other words, it’s the lowest common denominator solution. When you form a band it's just easier to write songs with collaborators in 4 beats to the bar.

When the first time signatures were invented, people thought that 9/8 (subdivided as 3+3+3) was the "perfect meter", because 3 represents the holy trinity. So when you have 3 beats, all of which have 3 subdivisions, that for them back then was the "holiest" possible rhythm. Classical music though preferred the more formal orderliness of 4 beats, or a square rather than the odd number of a triangle. 4/4 was the most common time signature in classical and romantic music but waltzes were common too, especially for less formal dances. Now in modern pop, songs in other time signatures than 4/4 are fairly rare. Ryhthm has a close connection to dance, and it just happens to be so that the most popular dances today are in 4/4. If waltz had become the most popular dance, then most pop music would probably be in 3/4. 

I suspect the most obvious answer is the versatility of 4 beats to a bar. You can divide 4 by 2 but 3 is a prime number. From that starting point waltzes began to become less frequent in todays’ world. And another important aspect is the media – radio in particular. Radio managers constructing playlists would be dubious about any time signature that wasn’t in 4/4 time. And after a while what the market wanted, the market got.